Mayor uses city email to campaign in his defense
Coral Gables activists Maria Cruz on Friday submitted 1,719 signed petitions to recall Mayor Vince Lago with the city clerk, taking the first step to remove him from office. Her group needs 1,649 signatures, or 5% of the 33,000 registered voters as of the last election — so they were only 70 signatures over.
That’s not a big buffer if the county finds some are invalid.
City Clerk Billy Urquia confirmed the number reported, but was still counting by hand late Friday. Cruz told Ladra that canvassers would still be collecting signatures on Saturday to pad that cushion.
Urquia will then send the whole batch on Monday to the Miami-Dade County Elections Department, which will validate them. Then, the recall group — and we don’t really know who they are beyond Cruz and her attorney, David Winker — will need to collect close to 5,000 signatures on a second petition that will then include a 200-word “defense” statement by Lago.
It should be easier the second time around. They already have the first 1,719 people to go to.
Read related: Coral Gables activist forms PAC to recall former friend, Mayor Vince Lago
“I’m more than happy to see over 1,700 people overcame their fear to sign the petition,” Cruz told Ladra. “Because most of what I heard is how scared people were to sign because of how vindictive Vince Lago is and how he would use the city’s resources to retaliate.”
“As we said when the recall began,” Winker said, “residents want the city moving in a different direction and their overwhelming support in signing over 1,700 petitions speaks volumes.”
In a month, by the way.
Yeah, Lago is butt hurt. The mayor — who has sent letters full of lies, had surrogates send letters full of lies and funded a phone bank to try to thwart the recall — sent a “special bulletin” to respond via his city email, which is inappropriate and could be an ethics violation because he is using city resources to campaign.
“When elected by the citizens of Coral Gables in 2021 and reelected in 2023, I promised that I would protect the interests of all our residents, business, and visitors,” he said, not mentioning that he was unopposed last year with a $1 million war chest. Oh, and he meant businesses. The special bulletin is full of typos and comes back to “vice mayor” Lago. Guess he hasn’t used his Contact Contact in a while.
Bro, tell Chelsea to clean that mess up.
“I promised bold leadership and a can-do plan to make our City Beautiful even more desirable for everyone,” Lago wrote. “I truly believe Coral Gables is on the right track, if we can all work together.”
What happened to “Winter is coming?”
“But sadly, this municipal recall effort is being pursued by special interests who want to control the future of our city,” Lago goes on, again. These pay-to-play interests are falsely portraying the recall as a resident-driven process, but the reality is far from that.
“Our residents were misled and deceived by illegally paid canvassers who used questionable tactics, false narratives, and outright defamatory accusations against our elected officials and me in particular.”
While the funding for the End The Corruption political action committee paying the canvassers has been hidden through a Tallahassee attorney who is a professional at hiding the sources of PAC money, Cruz and Winker say that people were also afraid to donate to the campaign because of retaliation.
Read related: Vince Lago recall canvassers stopped, harassed by Coral Gables Police
Lying Lago says a bunch of other things in his email that are just not true. But the best one is that the recall process itself is illegal. He says this because of state law wording that prohibits the paying of canvassers getting signatures only for a recall, which is why it doesn’t pass muster. Lago says in his “special bulletin” that he’s been in contact with law enforcement and urges residents who were “harassed and/or misled by these paid, out-of-town canvassers to reach out to us with your grievances.”
Ladra has heard nothing but nice things about the canvassers, who are professionally trained by the Ven Vamos Strategies group, which, by the way, has done work for the Vince Lago for Mayor campaign — he paid them more than $12,000 for canvassing and early voting work in 2021 — as well as the campaign for former State Rep Vance Aloupis. Oh, the irony!
As far as the legality of the canvassing, we’ve been here before, right? Because the law only makes it illegal to collect signatures for a recall effort — a self-serving law if we ever saw one — it’s been challenged already based on a U.S. Supreme Court 1988 decision that says laws against paying any canvassers to circulate petitions are a violation of the First Amendment. In 2010, the Supremes again solidified that when they ruled in favor of Citizens United, finding that the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, and other associations.
“No one affiliated with the recall has received any inquiry from law enforcement, which is not surprising,” Winker told Ladra. “Paid canvassers were used in the last two recent recalls, one against Sweetwater Mayor Orlando Lopez and one against Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo — and courts rejected challenges based on such payments.
“The law couldn’t be more settled that it is a violation of the First Amendment to criminalize paid canvassers,” Winker said.
That hasn’t stopped Lago from pressuring first the State Attorney’s Office and, now, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to file charges. But why doesn’t he pay an attorney like Ben Kuehne, who he got to prosecute an ethics complaint against Commissioner Melissa Castro, challenge the recall in court? Is he running out of money? Has his assets been frozen? Or is it because he knows he’d lose no matter what he says.
“The integrity of our democratic institutions depends on transparency, honesty, and adherence to established rules and regulations,” Lago said in his email, in what looks like a word salad he’ll eat later.
“We will not let these out-of-town special interests and their allies to [another typo] interfere with our city’s progress.”
Did he forget about the 1,719 city voters who signed the petition?
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